I received the following scam email at work. I work at a hotel, so this email is not totally misdirected. I post it here verbatim, errors and all.

I’m no genius and I have been scammed before, but people who still for this type of thing surely deserves to pay the price for the valuable lesson that they will learn when they’ve lost the money that they inevitably will from taking part in this scam:

Subject: ASK OF ROOMS

Hello Mr,Mrs

I am Dr Antonio Martins, and live in Ivory coast.

We turn to your hotel for a reservation for 3 people during the time of the :
December 15, 2007 To the December 22, 2007

Accept you payement with credit cards (Visa,Mastercard) ?

However ,we have some problem about our travel ; i called this moorning the person in charge of travel agency (INTER VOYAGES) where we have as a practice of reserve our Flytickets for the voyages ,and he say me that their terminal of credit card is broken since 2 days.

Also,we are currently inside the country for a seminar;from there , we will go on your premise

We would like that you help us if possible to charge on our credit cards the price of the rooms and the price of our Flytickets (6000 Euro).The person in charge of travel agency await only this sum to confirm our tickets and to be thus in the standards for the voyage.

For your help,we will give you a commission of 1000 Euro

If it’s possible ,please we awaiting your confirmation and the total invoice :

-RESERVATION ??????????????
-FLYTICKETS 6000 EUROS
-COMMISSION 1000 EUROS

Also ,we send you our credit card number and the name of the person in charge of travel agency for the WESTERN UNION transfer of the 6000 euros.

Thank you in advance.

Dr. Antonio Martins

+225 08445325

This email obviously has scam written all over it and the method is simple - if you’re greedy enough (stupid enough) to fall for this, you will more than likely receive some credit card numbers via email. These credit card numbers will obviously be stolen.

In fact, if you believe the email, they are from the Ivory Coast, but I’m willing to bet good money (send your bet in the meantime, sucker!) that the credit card numbers will have names very much unlike what you could expect to find in the Ivory Coast.

You will be required, according to the sop story in the email, to swipe the credit cards and take the funds, immediately making you a thief. You will then transfer the monies to them via Western Union (so they can be anywhere on the planet, really) and keep 1,000 Euro’s for your trouble and hard work - you hard worker and trouble taker you.

They will disappear with the monies that you sent them and your bank will reverse the charges from your EFT Point when the persons who’s credit card numbers they’ve stolen, disputes the charges. Of course, you won’t be able to provide anything remotely in the realm of permission, so you will be out of pocket those monies you transfered to them (because I guess the so-called Ivorians won’t be transferring that back to you).

Haha. Dunce!

The only people more stupid than sending these emails, are those who actually fall for it. For your greed (and stupidity), you must pay.

Don’t be greedy. Don’t be stupid. Don’t fall for this scam.

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The last 72 hours has been a costly pile-up of bills for me and for the next few days my beloved computer room, my blogging space, my physical my-space, will not be my favourite place.

Yesterday morning, before work, I downloaded a few pics to clear my camera memory. My computer is falling apart (can’t remember exactly, but its about 3 years old), but with the decent amount of RAM that it has, it still serves diligently and I can even edit video on it. The CPU battery has croaked, but that’s not a problem unless the power goes out, which then requires a time reset. The fan is also on it’s way out, and sometimes needs a manual kick-start to get it going - which is also not a problem as I leave the casing open for better ventilation and it’s easy enough to reach in and give it a flick.

However, my flat panel LCD is only slightly older than a year though. I had to get it separately as the CPU was given to me without a screen. Last night when I got home, I switched on the computer and went into the other room. I have a dual boot with Windows XP and Sabayon Linux (which I never use really, but Linux is the default boot menu selection). By the time I got back to the room, Sabayon had loaded and the familiar orange log-in screen was waiting for me, but with a very weird graphic to the right of the screen. I looked at it briefly, but not long, as I was anxious to reboot to get into XP to start blogging.

When Win XP had loaded the same odd graphic was sitting there, but in different colours and I did a double take. Upon closer inspection I saw that the graphic was in fact liquid crystal which has ran behind the mesh of what was now my broken LCD. Even closer scrutiny revealed what looked like two points of impact. But there’s honestly nothing to explain what caused it.

I live alone, I left it in one piece this morning, came back and this had happened. Perhaps one of those little lizards had a fight with a cockroach and they had a kung-fu fight ala Matrix on the screen and Agent Cockroach Smith smashed at Lizard Neo, who ducked and Agent Smith smashed right through the mesh of the screen. Perhaps.

My mood slumped and thumped audibly on the floor.

On the weekend, I got a quote for what I thought was minor damage to my car, but the minor impact fractured the headlight’s support arm, and much like the LCD, to fix it, would cost as much as replacing it. Even if they used non-OEM parts and replaced the headlights, the exercise will still set me back a good RM700 to repair.

Add to that the fact that the LCD screen will cost me at least another RM650 to replace and there goes the Christmas kitty. I snapped a few pictures of the broken screen to uploaded in my time before work this morning, but when I plugged in my Blue Tooth dongle that didn’t work either. At first Windows recognised it, but it didn’t want to identify my phone - then I unplugged it and replugged it and Windows didn’t even know what it was. “Please,” it said politely, “remove that foreign object that you stuck in my hole”. This toy luckily is only around RM20.

So anyway, I had an active weekend with loads of pictures, but I just couldn’t blog last night - my LCD sitting there with it’s broken black eye, multi-coloured puss dripping from the wound.

What to do but sulk?

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As always, I’m a little behind - which could explain the 0 I have in my Google Toolbar, but just now when I accessed Google.com I realised that finally something has been implemented that should really have been there from the start.

As you know, PageRank is Google’s way of indicating the importance of a website relevant to it’s contents. For instance, my poor page doesn’t have any PageRank, because it’s not important to anybody for any particular reason, i.e., nobody links to it. In the world of PageRank, the more people link to your site, the more important it appears to be, because as the Google-bot goes about it’s business following links, it will hit your site often if it’s linked to often and thus, increase your PageRank - in case you didn’t know.

If unimportant or, heaven forbid, irrelevant websites link to yours, then it does nothing and makes no difference to your PageRank. So, if you’re writing about the environment and a website about cars links to yours, according to my understanding of PageRank, that won’t make a difference to your site, even if the car website has a high PageRank.

But I digress.

In the world of PageRank, I would have expected the origin of PageRank, Google, to score as high as PageRank would allow - in other words 10, right? But it wasn’t until today that I actually noticed (Was it there before? Am I slow?) that Google finally scored itself a PageRank of 10.

Previously, and I’m sure I remember correctly, Google.com only had a PageRank of 8, or was it even 7 - I remember, because when I started reading up about PageRank I paid attention to that detail and they defo didn’t have 10, because I was still wondering if Google themselves can’t score a PageRank of 10, then who can.

But now I ponder the question - did Google, after the recent rounds of PageRank adjusting actually score 10 because they did so according to their own rules, or was the PageRank for google.com artificially manipulated, or did they actually design the formula so that it would calculate that google.com had maximum PageRank?

It brings about interesting questions, such as how does the PageRank formula work (an answer worth possible millions, provided Google doesn’t know you have the answer), did Google manipulate it for their own website and how does that effect the rest of us to who PageRank actually means money?

I previously asked this question “Why do I need PageRank”. Well, I know for one thing, in Pay Per Post, the higher your PageRank, the better opportunities you can apply for. I, with my poor PageRank, am stuck at the bottom of the opportunities options, which doesn’t pay as well as the ones for higher PageRank people - so where the 5’s and ups can post for megabucks, my 0 and I are religated to small-small amounts.

So, PageRank is important in the realm of the web - he says as if he’s the first to realise this - and it has money attached to it. But does Google benefit from it’s own PageRank being 10, or are they just saying “Na na na na na”?

As always, Andy Beard is on the bleeding edge, following Google’s antics. If I blogged like him maybe I could gain more than 0 on my site. With all the penalties for interlinking, especially to those low rankings sites, the man is still accepting paid posts and he doesn’t have NoFollow on his comment links - bless his blogging soul. He also gives insights into his advertising policies and his approach, stating that he doesn’t sell PageRank - but will Google notice? His front page currently shows PageRank 4 on my browser toolbar, but he doesn’t care as he dumped his Google toolbar.

Meanwhile, over at SearchEngineWatch.com, long time friends of Google and themselves holders of new PageRank 8, Kevin Ryan is asking “Should You Join the PageRank Hysteria?” Hey, who’s hysterical - not me, I have and only ever had 0 on my PR, not like I was affected. But I guess if you’re PageRank 7 dropped to 4, then the question is relevant to you.

ProBlogger.net also has a take on Google trimming PageRank and the comments in this post are quite interesting. It seems as if the net has been shaken by our friends who do no evil and it will be interesting to see what the repercussions of this will be.

PageRank’s authority on determining the authority of web pages seems to be at stake here and Google seems to be doing whatever it needs to for it to be able to accurately do that. But in the world of scalable solutions this seems to be an upward battle, because computers aren’t quite human yet, so it’s difficult to apply a blanket formula to every single webpage out there. By chopping PageRank and sending out clear messages to hopefully mostly “guilty” blogs, are they hoping to hit some and influence the rest by scary stories of PageRank drops?

If that is the strategy, it certainly appears to be working.

I guess for me, PageRank 0 isn’t a big deal, but likely only because I haven’t been in the realm of higher PageRanks to see what difference they actually make. Maybe when I’ve tasted the higher ranks, I’ll have a better understanding of what the hoo-ha is about.

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